Introducing Content Security Policy

Content Security Policy (CSP) is an added layer of security that helps to detect and mitigate certain types of attacks, including Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and data injection attacks. These attacks are used for everything from data theft to site defacement or distribution of malware.

CSP is designed to be fully backward compatible; browsers that don't support it still work with servers that implement it, and vice-versa. Browsers that don't support CSP simply ignore it, functioning as usual, defaulting to the standard same-origin policy for web content. If the site doesn't offer the CSP header, browsers likewise use the standard same-origin policy.

Enabling CSP is as easy as configuring your web server to return the Content-Security-Policy HTTP header. (Prior to Firefox 23, the X-Content-Security-Policy header was used). See Using Content Security Policy for details on how to configure and enable CSP.

Note: The Content Security Policy standard specifies that a <meta> element can be used to configure a policy, but this behavior is not yet supported in Firefox. Support for this feature is being added in bug 663570.

Mitigating cross site scripting

A primary goal of CSP is to mitigate and report XSS attacks. XSS attacks exploit the browser's trust of the content received from the server. Malicious scripts are executed by the victim's browser because the browser trusts the source of the content, even when it's not coming from where it seems to be coming from.

CSP makes it possible for server administrators to reduce or eliminate the vectors by which XSS can occur by specifying the domains that the browser should consider to be valid sources of executable scripts. A CSP compatible browser will then only execute scripts loaded in source files received from those whitelisted domains, ignoring all other script (including inline scripts and event-handling HTML attributes).

As an ultimate form of protection, sites that want to never allow scripts to be executed can opt to globally disallow script execution.

Mitigating packet sniffing attacks

In addition to restricting the domains from which content can be loaded, the server can specify which protocols are allowed to be used; for example (and ideally, from a security standpoint), a server can specify that all content be loaded using HTTPS.

Note: A complete data transmission security strategy includes not only enforcing HTTPS for data transfer, but also marking all cookies with the secure flag and providing automatic redirects from HTTP pages to their HTTPS counterparts.

Note: Sites may also use the Strict-Transport-Security HTTP header to ensure that browsers connect to them only over an encrypted channel.